https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/28/23528003/sherlock-holmes-metropolis-to-the-lighthouse-public-domain-day-2023

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Sherlock Holmes will finally escape copyright this weekend

Sherlock Holmes will finally escape copyright this weekend

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Metropolis, To The Lighthouse, and the final Holmes stories are all
entering the public domain.

By Adi Robertson / @thedextriarchy

Dec 28, 2022, 6:00 PM UTC|

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A portrait of Sherlock Holmes smoking a pipe from the early 1900s.
A portrait of Holmes by artist Sidney Paget. Wikimedia

Watching the copyrights on art expire still feels like a novelty.
After all, the US public domain was frozen in time for 20 years,
thawing only in 2019. But this weekend's Public Domain Day will give
our cultural commons a few particularly notable new works. As
outlined by Duke Law School's Center for the Study of the Public
Domain, the start of 2023 will mark the end of US copyrights on Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle's final Sherlock Holmes stories -- along with the
seminal science fiction movie Metropolis, Virginia Woolf's To the
Lighthouse, and the first full-length "talkie" film The Jazz Singer.

The public domain lets anyone republish, remix, or remake works
without the permission of the rights holder -- typically long after
the original author is dead. In previous years it's created booms
around new interpretations of works like The Great Gatsby, which
entered the public domain in 2021. More generally, you can thank it
for Dracula Daily, a newsletter that creatively recontextualized the
classic vampire novel, or its spiritual successor Whale Weekly about
Moby Dick. And as the Duke summary points out, the public domain
frees archivists to preserve and redistribute works that might
otherwise be lost, like a wealth of silent films (including
Metropolis) whose copyright is definitively expiring this year.

The Holmes news specifically also marks the end of a tortured legal
debate about how copyright law should treat the character. Several of
Doyle's earlier works were already in the public domain before 2019,
but the author's estate argued this shouldn't loosen its hold. That
led to multiple legal tangles over unauthorized new Sherlock Holmes
stories, including a now-settled suit against Netflix for its spinoff
Enola Holmes. Now, if you were considering a new interpretation of
the world's greatest detective, there's never been a better time to
do it. Just spare a thought for Canada while you do it -- thanks to a
law issued earlier this year, it's about to start its own 20-year
freeze. And get ready for one of the biggest copyright landmarks of
all next year: the public domain debut of Mickey Mouse.

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